Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational (Cross Cultures 89)

The present collection aims at throwing light on transculturality and the identities and masks that people put on, in writing as much as in life, in an age of global levelling and the struggle for a particular place in a postcolonial world. Topics covered include: North African identity in France; cultural citizenship and the Asian diaspora; novels of 'beur' self-identity by Maghrebi immigrants in France; Scottish fiction, Britain and Empire; memory, amnesia, and the re-invention of the past in South Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere; borders, necrophilia and history in Southern African fiction; encodings of female control; spectating in black documentary cinema; theatre, performance, and the Western presence in Africa; masks, history, transtextuality, and other aspects of Irish poetry and drama; the masking and unmasking of identity in the African-American novel; violence and 'Titus Andronicus' in black Nova Scotian poetry; notions of the national and of indigeneity in contemporary Canadian drama; Native Canadians, space, and the city. Authors and artists treated include: William Boyd; André Brink; George Elliott Clarke; David Dabydeen; Ralph Ellison; Bessie Head; Seamus Heaney; Tomson Highway; Isaac Julien; Daniel David Moses; Paul Muldoon; Albert Murray; Jean Rhys; Sir Walter Scott; Robert Louis Stevenson; Richard Wright; and W.B. Yeats. Table of Contents Introduction PRELUDE Wenche OMMUNDSEN: Have Culture, Will Travel: Cultural Citizenship and the Imagined Communities of Diaspora; A Fiction I NOVELS AND THEIR BORDERS Priscilla RINGROSE: 'Beur' Narratives of Self-Identity: Beyond Boundaries and Binaries Alan FREEMAN: Allegories of Ambivalence: Scottish Fiction, Britain and Empire Ute KAUER: The Need to Storify: Re-inventing the Past in André Brink's Novels Johan SCHIMANSKI: The Postcolonial Border: Bessie Head's "The Wind and a Boy" David BELL: The Intimate Presence of Death in the Novels of Zakes Mda: Necrophilic Worlds and Traditional Belief Ulla RAHB